How’s it going?

I’m back from an un-announced 2 month break. 😅 Also, happy new year and hope its been good so far for you.

A re-introduction – Hackletter is where I share my journey about building side projects, the lessons I learn and success I have. If this is no longer relevant to you, you can unsubscribe. We can still be friends, I promise!

Other than falling sick in the beginning of this year, it was good so far.

The question that I explored few issues ago, which is "Can AI be your coworker?", is answered now.

With ChatGPT, its a sure shot YES.

I mean, go on to Twitter and search for "chatgpt, you'll find overwhelming responses on what its capable of doing.

Staring at the blank page is the biggest issue that knowledge workers tackle with.

For us - programmers, it might be staring at the blank file. Flow state is what we all aim to be in.

But how long can you be in flow state. Can you just keep working?

Ernest Hemingway, a well renowned author, would stop writing his piece when he knew what came next.

This isn’t an email about building your side hustles, like you get from me every other Tuesday. But it sure helps you in doing it.

It’s about coffee. ☕

I wrote a short post on my website about how make my coffee these days and my thoughts around it. These are the highlights from it

• Pour over coffee
• I drink it black
• Beans are ground using a hand burr grinder
• v60 is the technique I use

AI is becoming mainstream these days. It has become more accessible and easy to use.

Over the past couple of days, I've toyed around with all this cool AI stuff and I wrote a blog post noting down the things I enjoyed.

Full Post - Playing with AI - Can it become your coworker?

I’ve built multiple projects that no one asked me to. It wasn’t part of my job either.

The main driving reason being – solve problems, little or big, that I face in my life.

I’ve always looked for ways I can use technology, or the programming skills I’ve acquired, to help me optimise and live a better life.

I feel that should be the ultimate use of your skills. Sure, you can get a job and help others solve their problems, and in turn get money. But why not put those skills to use for yourself.

Finding time to work on your side projects is difficult.

Especially when you have a day job which task which takes up your time and energy. And if you have other commitments, like kids, you know that becomes complicated.

It makes you feel like you aren’t making enough progress on your side projects. Right?

Sacred Side Hustle Hours

Does it happen to you - After a while, you don’t get the same amount of joy while making progress on the side project as you got when you started it?

I asked this on Twitter and there were interesting replies.

Number one reason why people loose interest in side projects is because they under estimate the time and energy it takes to ship. Starting with wrong or too many expectations are enough to make you loose interest.

Set your expectations right.

I love it when people give me hand written things, like letters and post cards.

It feels personal and authentic. Modern fonts and text miss that feel.

I attempted this by clicking pictures of handwritten sentences in a notebook and screenshotting notes on iPad with Apple pencil and uploading it to the web. That's the only way to get it to the web - take pictures and post.

It sure works well on Instagram but not so much on the searchable internet.

It's hard to learn everything on the job. If you don't have a job this concept applies more.

In the early days of the job, you have a lot of new stuff to learn and see how things integrates with everything else. It's exciting learning and filling in knowledge gaps. When you finally understand what to change where, and that works, it's joyful.

The joy decreases as you get comfortable with the codebase.

The tech stack is fixed and rarely changes. Most of the times, you never get to start a codebase from scratch. Consider yourself lucky if you do.

… even if it is the same email, you aren’t the same man.

Wait, here is the original quote -

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. – Heraclitus (Greek philosopher)

Ichigo Ichie 📖

I've got you supplies for your digital garden. I've built an easiest way to get started with your digital garden.

First things first - What is a digital garden?

The phrase "digital garden" is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting "showpiece" and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.
— Joel Hooks (My blog is a digital garden, not a blog)

It is a place where things grow.

I've been a bit sick over the last week and I needed something to play with.

I came across n8n, an automation tool like Zapier, which was fun. First I created a workflow (or an automation) that runs every morning and sends me a message on Telegram telling how many views I got on my website.

Rain started pouring in last week and the weather is all pleasant. Temperatures dropped below 30C and that's a relief as it was close to 40C in the summers.

Cup of coffee ☕ and the sound of rain 🌧️ is a bliss.

Coming to the topic of this week's Hackletter - Self hosting apps & services.

Hope you are doing great.

I've told in the last email that I've started to work on Letterhive, which is an SEO friendly archive (or a website) for any newsletter. I want to talk about how the development went till now.

No links to share this time too, but you can expect it soon.

Setting up the project

Hello, How are you doing today?

I've been working on my new side project, Letterhive, which is an SEO friendly archive (or a website) for any newsletter. The content is automatically updated as the users send emails to their subscribers, and, it works with any newsletter 🎉.

I don't have much to share at this point. I just bought the domain. As soon as I have a demo up and running, I will share the links.

First steps are to use Letterhive for this newsletter. I'm building for myself initially.

If there is anything that has helped me directly in building apps and do my day job, it is this - a consistent place to note down.

Something that is always available for you write or scribble.

What I use depends on the work I'm doing. I use a notebook and pen for day job which lies just beside my mouse on the table. It's always open - I make todos and do my thinking there.

When it comes to working on side projects, I use Notion as you can properly organize things there.

You read that right. In order to become better, do boring things consistently.

Let me explain.

The boring stuff, things which are not Snapchat-able or Instagram-able, are the ones that make you better.

Eating at home is boring. Working out is boring. Reading a book is boring. Journaling is boring.

If you didn't know yet, I'm building a side project, Stackblocks, which lets users embed an archive of their newsletters on personal websites.

And, it just got a paying subscriber in 12th April this year. 🎉

Will not be able to put this feeling in words, but ecstatic is a close match.

https://twitter.com/aravindballa/status/1514089921178349571

Well yeah, we should write comments in code to explain what’s happening in a better way.

But before that, why not write self explanatory code?

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.

- Donald Knuth

Before we write a comment, give a thought if you can change the name of variable or a function to make the code talk for itself.